


On the Shadow of a Brahmese Child

by onetiredboy



Series: Lilith & Ophelia [1]
Category: The Penumbra Podcast
Genre: Art Attached, Canon-Typical Violence, F/F, OH and brahma, Other, like definitely police brutality, soft girls fallin in love, which is - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-12
Updated: 2019-12-12
Packaged: 2021-02-26 04:53:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,691
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21767896
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/onetiredboy/pseuds/onetiredboy
Summary: His parents speak:
Relationships: OC/OC, Peter Nureyev/Juno Steel
Series: Lilith & Ophelia [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1595923
Comments: 20
Kudos: 75





	1. Of Them

**Author's Note:**

> based on the poem 'on the shadow of a japanese child blasted upon a wall after the dropping of an atomic bomb in 1945', with the pronouns changed:
> 
> His parents speak:  
> We thought – when you were young there’d be  
> the usual things:  
> the time of toys, of dolls with black fringed hair,  
> and pull-along wooden ducks…  
> the time of pets, white mice on treadmills,  
> a canary in a bamboo cage, trilling of freedom,  
> a pet cricket…  
> the time of boys,  
> when dreaming is a continuous newsreel  
> and even the stern battle for the first home-islands  
> would be just a distant mutter of thunder  
> that the sidelong glance of a boy in a classroom  
> could make one easily forget…
> 
> -but, on the morning in question,  
> high in the heavens over our city,  
> a single plane loosed a single bomb,  
> and all those things which might have been reasonably expected  
> became suddenly phantasmal
> 
> and i am SO INCREDIBLY LUCKY to be able to say that the wonderfully talented ao3 user umbrellaterm, a.k.a princedenuages on twitter, did some art for this fic!! it killed me.

Her name was Ophelia, and she was in love.

The object of her affection was the girl who worked at the campus floristry, and shared one of her history classes. Her name was Lilith. Her major was in agriculture, she took electives in history because, she said, she’d always held a passion for exploring the intricate foundations of the world she lived in. Although her parents wanted her to use her agriculture degree to inherit the family farm one day, she planned to leave after her degree was over and open up her own florist shop on the other side of the Outer-Rim.

She was perfect.

Ophelia’s major was astronavigation, but she also took classes in anthropology and art history, which was the class they shared. Astronavigation was a doomed course, people told her, because when the war finally reached its fingers out to her planet those that had been trained in spaceflight would be the first drafted. But she wasn’t going to fight in a war. She would escape long before then, and become the first Outer-Rim pilot to win the Uranus Tournament. But the war, then, was a distant mutter of thunder on the horizon, and it would be long before it worried her.

She hung around the floristry too much for somebody who was just _perusing._

Lilith didn’t seem to mind, by the way she bit back a smile when Ophelia pretended to be interested in arranging a bouquet for a recently-married friend.

“These are dahlias,” Lilith told her, her finger grazing against the underside of a soft pink petal. “They’re my favourites. They represent strength, elegance, and dignity,” she said. Then she leaned in conspiratorially, “But my favourite thing about them is that they symbolise commitment and an everlasting bond, but _also_ dishonesty, instability and betrayal. Now if _that_ isn’t a mixed message for a wedding bouquet…”

Ophelia laughed, her honest-giggle kind of laugh, and Lilith smiled.

Later Ophelia would be walking when she sensed-more-than-felt something fall of her pocket. It was a dahlia. How Lilith had snipped it from the bunch and slipped it into her pocket, she would never know.

She held it up to the light. It had a pale yellow centre, which faded outwards into blue-purple around the edges. Elegance and dignity. Dishonesty and instability.

Ophelia put it back into her pocket. Now if _that_ wasn’t a mixed message for a romantic gesture…

* * *

Lilith had dark brown hair that came to her shoulders. She wore exclusively floral patterns, which Ophelia couldn’t quite bring herself to say was a little bit of overkill. She was also the kind of person who loved playing games, and if the dahlia in Ophelia’s pocket was a set-up then Ophelia wasn’t going to miss out on her move.

“This piece,” Ophelia opened her art history textbook, “Is a gift from the fourth established king of Io to the noble he wished to court, before the neo-socialist uprising. They don’t teach it to us in the syllabus anymore because Io’s new government doesn’t like history from before that era reproduced. But I got my textbook third-hand, it’s almost ten years old.”

“How rebellious,” Lilith teased. She lay down on her bed beside Ophelia and grinned up at her. She had this sneaking, scheming kind of smile, like she was humouring the world, waiting for it to do something worth her attention. Ophelia wanted to lean down and end her wait.

Instead she just nudged her, “The colour purple was widely accepted in Io culture at the time to be a sign of romantic interest, which is why all the shadows in the piece are a dark purple rather than grey or black. It’s really subtle. Of course, the piece never got completed before the king was killed, which is why a quarter of the canvas is still white. White, at that time in Io’s culture, symbolised ill-fated love.”

“Oh,” Lilith breathed, she sat up and peered over Ophelia’s shoulder at the painting, “That’s so morbid. I love it.”

“Call me a romantic, if you like,” Ophelia said, “But this painting has always been my favourite.”

When Lilith left to go to the bathroom, Ophelia tore out the page of the textbook and tucked it under one of Lilith’s bedsheets.

And so the game began.

“—which means this flower is meant to symbolise—”

“—one of the most romantic pieces of art, in my opinion—”

“—only flowers in spring, so new lovers often—”

“—the artist, of course, had no idea their lover would see it—”

And so on, in pieces and pieces, over several months, until, of course, it came to an end.

* * *

Ophelia had long black hair, the same colour as her bright eyes, and a sharp-but-soft face. She had no real preference for the clothes that she wore, though something could be said for an obvious influence of a long-gone teenage phase of all-black clothing. She found herself wearing dresses with floral themes more and more often, and none of her friends had the heart to tell her quite how sappy she was. She was also the patient kind of person who, once a game began, would be determined to see it to the end.

This was not a trait she shared with Lilith.

She opened the door to the floristry one day, and Lilith was there.

“Another flower to show me?”

Lilith shook her head and smiled a sharp, scheming smile. “Ophelia,” she said.

She leaned forward to pluck Ophelia’s glasses from her face. Ophelia was still blinking in shock when Lilith kissed her.

When Ophelia stumbled from the floristry, some hours later, she reached down to find a red rose in her pocket. Its message was loud and clear.

* * *

They both graduated with perfect GPAs. Their friends often joked that they’d shiver to think of the kinds of arguments the two of them had, as sharp with words as they were, and Ophelia and Lilith only smiled their secretive smiles. They never fought.

They were married four years later, a small affair on Lilith’s family’s farm. It was cute to have it there; cute to watch Lilith’s embarrassment at the way her family spoke and dressed, at the mud caking the skirter boards of the farmhouse.

Ophelia took Lilith’s name.

Then the world began to change around them. The tides of the war began to lap at the edge of their sector. The night sky was tinged with the distant orange glow of residual laser-fire; drills became more common, with people throwing themselves to the ground when the sirens began. When rumours began to spread of people from their planet being drafted to fight, Ophelia felt some inner part of her unfurl itself.

Evacuations began.

Ophelia didn’t mean to get caught. She didn’t even really mean to wake up at all.

It was midnight, and when the kitchen light flicked on, Ophelia’s suitcase was open on the bench.

Lilith sagged against the doorway, her eyes tired.

“I—” Ophelia began.

“I know,” Lilith said. She stepped forward and cupped Ophelia’s face in her hands, “This is what you have to do.”

“I’ll be back,” Ophelia told her.

Lilith smiled softly and shook her head, “You can’t promise that.”

“I can,” Ophelia said. Her eyes were so bright and determined – you could believe anything was possible, when somebody was looking at you that way. You could believe that not even war could tear her away. “I will be back.”

Sometimes belief in a promise is enough.

Lilith kissed her. She had a kiss like flower-petals, a taste like pollen that always left Ophelia wanting more. “Let’s meet on Brahma,” she said, “I’ll move there and open a flower shop. Meet me there.”

“On Brahma,” Ophelia confirmed. She squeezed Lilith’s hands in hers and then kissed her again, “I love you. I’ll see you on Brahma.”

* * *

Ophelia was no war hero.

She was tough, yes, the war pushed her to her very limits and she learned to cope. And she did show bravery, yes, she was always the last to give up as battles for territory waged across the system. She saved lives. She lost friends. But only the war’s fringes brushed against her home-world, and brave as she was, she was not quite the revolutionary she would have had to be to push further into centre of battle. She was brave, and strong, and stuck to her values of justice and protecting civilians – she was also just another soldier, among millions.

Five long years, she served, before her home-world fell and the army, on its last legs and in severe need of better conservation of resources, gave her entire squadron an honourable discharge.

Brahma had only one flower shop. It was easy enough to find.

* * *

The weather on Brahma was almost suspiciously perfect, every day. The house Ophelia had bought with the money she had received from the limited veteran pension she was allocated had a perfect view of the square. Children played in the park and pointed at shapes in the clouds. Sometimes Ophelia wondered how many of the lights in the night sky she saw were not stars at all, but ships on fire, their crews all slaughtered. She kept these thoughts to herself.

There were two rocking chairs on the porch in front of their house. They usually only used one.

Lilith had let her hair grow all the way down her back. It tumbled like so many roots, shone like waxy leaves. She sat in her wife’s lap and kissed her over and over.

A little girl shrieked in joy as her brother pushed her down the slide.

Ophelia pulled away from Lilith, “I want to start a family with you.”

Lilith laughed, her bright-bubble laugh, and then began to cry. She nodded, collapsing into Ophelia’s shoulder and holding her tight.

Lilith carried the child in the end; the doctors were worried that some minor injuries Ophelia had sustained in the war may have lowered her ability to successfully complete a pregnancy.

These nine months were the only time during which Lilith and Ophelia fought. Lilith shouted after two hours of Ophelia trying to decide which of two incredibly similar shades of yellow to paint the baby’s room. Ophelia lost her temper after Lilith made her go to the shops and buy snacks only to change her mind the moment she walked in the door. Sometimes they would both burst into tears, exhausted and tired of fighting. They’d lie in bed and kiss each other and promise never to let anything come between them again. The next morning, something inevitably would.

Their child was born with Ophelia’s black hair and Lilith’s smile, and suddenly Ophelia and Lilith had never been more in love. They laughed when their little baby tumbled over, sighed when their child cooed at them – even sorted out a roster for who would soothe the baby on what nights when they woke up screaming and crying.

As the baby grew, they began to introduce themselves as a male with more and more consistency. Ophelia and Lilith had named their son Peter, tentatively, with the thought to change it if it didn’t suit, but as he grew into their hearts and into his body, he grew into his name, like it had always been meant for him. And there was a ring to _Peter Nureyev_ that they liked, something dangerous in the sound of it that reminded them both of a younger version of themselves.

He had both of their hunger for knowledge and their love for art. He was reading by three, tearing through the art history textbooks that Lilith had stored.

“You kept them?” Ophelia asked, when her then-four-year-old son toddled up to her one day to point at the book and ask what the word ‘imperialism’ meant.

“Good memories,” Lilith said, “Like the page you left me all those years ago. I still keep it folded in my locket, you know.”

“Speaking of which, love, why is our son wearing your anniversary present?”

Lilith shrugged and smiled her danger-smile, “He likes it. Says he wants to have Mommy nearby all the time. I’m the favourite, you know.”

“Like hell you are.”

“No swearing in front of Peter!”

* * *

Ophelia loved kissing her wife.

Kissing her wife was, maybe, her favourite thing in the whole world to do, which made it an added bonus that she was so good at it, and that her wife’s favourite thing to do was kiss her back.

They were in bed. Peter was finally old enough to sleep in his own room most nights – he’d just gone on six – which meant Ophelia and Lilith were finally liberated from mother-duty enough to get back to lover-duty.

Lilith laughed when Ophelia slipped her hand under the hem of her shirt – a relieved, happy kind of laugh, a ‘I’ve-been-waiting-for-this’ kind of laugh. Ophelia smiled, and then turned Lilith’s laugh into a gasp.

There was a knock at the door, “Mom?”

“You have got to be kidding me,” Ophelia let her forehead fall into Lilith’s shoulder. “Let’s pretend we’re asleep.”

“Mom? I had a nightmare.”

Ophelia sighed, “I’d rather be back on the frontlines than deal with this.”

Lilith swatted her on the arm, “Don’t say things like that. I’ll go put him back to bed, you stay here and make sure you’re ready for me when I come back, hm?”

“Alright,” Ophelia rolled onto her back and grinned, “But also, don’t be so superstitious. The war is a long way from Brahma. I’m not going to be redrafted any time soon.”

Lilith shivered, “Don’t, Ophelia. I waited five long years to have you back. Don’t make fun of me for being scared of losing you again.”

“Nothing is going to happen to us,” Ophelia promised her.

Sometimes belief in a promise isn’t enough.

* * *

The war had just begun to grumble on the outskirts of Brahma when New Kinshasa, the floating planet above, unveiled its latest invention.

It was a protest; an anti-war one. There had been plenty of them in the months previous to that day, though they’d slowly been growing in size and disruption.

“We should go around,” Lilith mumbled. Peter was riding on her back and she set him down on the ground. He was six years old and already had to wear glasses – he’d inherited Ophelia’s eyesight, by the looks of things. He was already tall for his age; he could be passed off as a boy of at least eight with his height and sharp tongue – he’d inherited Lilith’s quick wit, by the sounds of things.

“I wanna see!”

Ophelia took his hand and held it tight, “We can push through. They’re hardly going to do anything to us.”

“Ophelia, you’re a veteran,” Lilith reminded her, a concerned edge to her voice, “There are rumours that protestors are starting to target anybody they see as having played a part in the war.”

“And they’re, what, going to stone me in front of my infant son?”

“I really wish you wouldn’t say things like that…”

“Come on. I’m not adding ten minutes onto our journey because of fear of a crowd. Hold tight, Peter,” she added in his direction, squeezing his hand.

The protestors didn’t want anything to do with them – of course. They were peaceful, only protesting against a war they were afraid of dying in. In a slightly different world, Ophelia would probably have been one of them. Right now, she was concentrating on navigating her wife and son across the tide to the other side of the square, where Peter had a hair appointment.

It happened so fast.

The sky cracked like a whip. For a moment, every face was frozen in bright, electric blue. Then there was an ear-splitting scream, and the smell of burning.

For one moment, one miniscule point frozen in time, everything was still.

Another crack, and screaming rippled through the crowd like a tsunami. The sky lit itself on fire. Ophelia felt every hair on her arms stand up. The next crack was so close she could smell it; the burnt-plastic; a person next to her for one moment connected from the back of their neck to the clouds above, posed in perfect fear. Then the sky went back again and the body crumpled.

“Ophelia! Ophelia!”

Ophelia whipped around towards the voice of her wife, but the salmon stream of people blinded her. She was pushed and shaken, screams filling her ears, her mouth, her lungs. More burnt-plastic smell, the gradual inevitable stench of burnt-body rising to meet it.

Someone pushed past her so hard she stumbled backwards, and Ophelia felt terror overcome her, “Peter?!” she screamed, “Peter?!”

“Ophelia!” two hands clamped onto her arm. Lilith’s eyes were wide, her face pale and sweating, “Where is he? Where is he?”

The sky cracked; someone beside them fell and the crowd exploded outwards in terror. Ophelia, with Lilith clinging to her, was pushed and shoved. It was that that saved her – she couldn’t move by herself. She was rooted to the spot, whipping around to look for a small body among the growing piles of adult ones, screaming his name.

Someone shoved them hard enough that they fell. A lightning bold hit the ground so close that the pavement under Ophelia’s hands burned. She turned to Lilith, “We have to get out of here.”

“No, no, no. No, no, no…”

“We can search for him from shelter, we—Peter!” she cried, desperately, clinging her wife to her chest. The hair on her arms stood up again, “Lilith—Lilith, stand up, we’ll be killed here.” Ophelia dragged her wife to her feet, shuffling them to shelter.

Lilith sobbed into Ophelia’s shoulder. She was shaking, and Ophelia had spent enough time on the frontlines to recognise shock. She slumped Lilith against a wall under the shelter of a nearby shop and craned her neck to look back out into the crowd. “ _Peter?_ ” she shrieked, _“Peter?_ ”

She turned back to Lilith, “We can find him. He’s a smart, smart boy. He’ll run. We’ll get the police. They’ll find him, no problem. Lilith – _Peter?!_ ”

The sky stopped cracking apart after a while. Ophelia made sure Lilith was sitting still and got ready to venture out into the crowds to search before she heard the whistles. Police. Here to finish off what the lasers hadn’t. They would be killed for sheltering here.

She looked around. Lilith was shaking too much to walk – she couldn’t leave her alone or she’d be detained, or worse. But she couldn’t search for Peter here. Her mind was swimming, “We have to get out of here. We’ll be killed, we have to go.”

A police whistle: close. Ophelia stood Lilith up. “He’s a smart boy, he’ll be fine. He’s a smart boy, he’ll be fine. We’ll find him first thing in the morning. He’s a smart boy,” she repeated, though whether to herself or to Lilith, she wasn’t sure.

She ended up dragging Lilith home. She was shivering by the time they got there, out of tears to cry and crippled by shock and fear. “No, no, no,” she repeated, “No, no, no.”

“We’ll find him,” Ophelia promised her, tears in her own voice, “We’ll find him, Lilith, I promise you, we’ll find him. He’s a smart boy. He won’t have gone far.”

She tucked Lilith into their bed and walked into the lounge room. He wasn’t old enough to know his way back from the city square, but if anything, their little boy – their Peter Nureyev – had done nothing but leave them in awe his whole, short life. So she would sit on the porch and wait, guarding the street until the sun rose.

On her way onto the porch, Ophelia almost knocked a letter off of the table near the door, where they kept their keys and bills and other assorted important things. It was unopened. It was addressed to her. Ophelia picked it up, and pocketed it.

* * *

They didn’t sleep for four nights. The moment the sun rose, the two of them left their house and wandered the streets, calling for their son. His name hadn’t been listed in the list of confirmed dead from the protest, though neither of them had been able to work up the courage to go to the morgue and search through those bodies that had been deemed unidentifiable by police. He was alive, they told each other. He was alive, and smart, and brave, and they would find him.

Each night as the sun sank they would return home and sit on the porch, hoping that their brave little boy would find _them_. They jumped and cried out his name to passing shadows that revealed themselves to be judgemental alley cats.

“Why can’t we go to the police?” Lilith begged her one night, and Ophelia’s breath caught in her throat.

“We were at the protest,” she said weakly, “They’ll arrest us for being there.”

“Can’t we tell them what happened? We can explain the whole thing to them,” Lilith pleaded.

“They won’t believe us.”

“You said yourself that we’d go to the police first thing, the day we lost him.”

“Well, I thought about it more,” Ophelia said.

“But—”

“That’s final,” Ophelia snapped.

Lilith’s shoulders slumped. She didn’t say anything back, only glanced down at the wood beneath her shoes and leaned back into the rocking chair.

When Lilith finally fell asleep against Ophelia’s shoulder, as the sun rose on the fifth morning, she cried out his name, over and over, in her sleep. Ophelia shivered. She had put her son in danger and left her wife barely able to make it through each day with any hope, and things could only get worse from here. She would not fall asleep. Not until they found him. Not until she redeemed herself.

She was woken by being dragged to her feet.

“Ophelia Nureyev? You’re coming with us.”

This voice belonged to the man currently turning her in his arms and attaching cuffs to her wrists. He was too large for her to fight, and backed up by an equally large officer standing to the side of him.

“Ophelia?”

This voice belonged to Lilith, and the sound of it woke Ophelia up suddenly and vividly. She twisted in her cuffs to face the policeman behind her, “Please,” she begged with him, “You can’t do this now. You can’t.”

“What’s the charge?” Lilith was on her feet.

Ophelia looked back at her. Her eyes were lined with dark purple bruises, and she wavered on her feet even as she eyed over the police officers, “You can’t arrest without a charge. What’s the charge?”

She was speaking to the police officer, but she was looking at Ophelia. Ophelia felt her eyes fill with tears.

“Draft evasion,” she and the police officer said, at the same time.

“You have to understand,” Ophelia continued desperately, straining forwards so that the police officer’s fingers dug into her shoulders. “I couldn’t leave you. Not just after we lost him. I couldn’t put that on you.”

“So you got yourself _arrested?”_

“Please,” Ophelia pushed forward, twisting her body until she was free of the police officer’s grip. She ran forward, burying her head into Lilith’s shoulder, “You have to keep going. You have to find him.”

“We can continue this conversation down at the station, Mrs. Nureyev,” the officer grunted, and Ophelia stepped back from her wife.

Tears streamed down Lilith’s face. “I can’t do this without you,” she whispered. “I can’t. I’m not strong enough.”

“Yes, you are,” Ophelia whispered, “You have to be. For Peter. You have to be. Please.”

“Let’s _go_ , Mrs. Nureyev, or we’ll have to get you for resisting arrest, too.”

Ophelia went.

She was sentenced to 20 years. It was double the normal punishment, but with the war so thinned out they had had to raise the stakes so that less people would risk trying to evade service. She would later be told that her wife was bed-bound with grief and had passed the search for their son onto the police.

Peter Nureyev was never found.

* * *


	2. Of Us

“My love, is that my necklace?”

“Oh, you like it?”

Juno pushes the collar of his shirt open. Against his dark skin shines a locket of a dahlia flower, yellow in the centre and blue-purple around the edges. He batters his eyelashes.

Peter Nureyev sighs, “Dear. What did I tell you about going through my things?”

Juno’s eyelashes are still battering. Maybe he has something stuck in his eye, “That it’s… super adorable of me?”

Nothing stuck in his eye, then, just an exaggerated attempt to get away with his incessant curiosity. Nureyev can’t help but smile, but he bites it back as quickly as he can, “Not quite.”

“Where’d you get it?” Juno asks. He reaches back behind his neck to unclasp the locket and hands it over.

Nureyev can’t help himself, he reaches forward to catch it like a baby bird, like an eggshell, like his most prized possession, even if he can’t explain where the feeling bubbles up in him from. “I don’t recall,” he answers, and walks over to sit on the bed. He turns it over in his hand.

Juno joins him, peering over his shoulder. He reaches out a finger to graze over the engraving on the silver side of the locket, “Lilith Ophelia,” he reads.

“The name of the jeweller, I assume,” Peter mutters. He frowns suddenly, something twitching in the back of his mind, and turns it over again slowly, “I think I’ve had it my whole life.”

“Is there anything inside it?” Juno asks.

“No,” Peter clicks it open, “There was a piece of paper in there, I think, for a while. But I can’t for the life of me remember what it was. Quite meaningless, whatever the case.”

“Could it be from your father?”

Peter’s breath catches. He puts the locket down. Since New Kinshasa – since Mag – since he learnt that the memories he’d imprinted into his mind of his parents were placed there by a man who only wanted to use him, Peter has become very careful not to trust any memory about his childhood. Even the most vivid one: of lasers cracking down in the middle of some kind of protest he was too young to understand, is too close to a story Mag told him once for him to really believe it.

“You know,” Juno says, slowly, “You’re on—or were on—the Brahmese census database, right? Rita could probably hack in to those records. We could… find out who your parents were. Nureyev?”

Peter flinches. He turns to Juno, “Sorry.”

“No, I’m sorry,” Juno says quickly, “Fuck, sorry. I know this isn’t a good topic for you. I’m sorry.”

Nureyev smiles thinly and buries his head into the side of Juno’s neck to let him know it’s alright. He kisses Juno’s collarbone. Then he pulls his head away.

“I… don’t think I could handle it,” he admits. “Knowing who they are. If they’re alive, I mean, what then? And if they’re not, well, that only leaves me with more questions than answers.”

Juno nods. He reaches for Nureyev’s hand and brings it to his mouth, kissing the back of it, “Well. You have us, now.”

“I know.”

“And if you ever want to find out… you’ll have us then, too,” Juno assures him. “And I won’t go through your stuff anymore,” he adds.

Nureyev laughs and pushes Juno back onto the bed, rolling over him.

“Is that where you got the idea for calling me Dahlia from?” Juno asks, “From your necklace-thingy?”

“Oh, no,” Peter sighs, “I’m afraid I simply love the flowers. Always have. Did you know they symbolise somebody with strong values, somebody with inner strength? And they symbolise commitment. They’re quite a romantic flower, you know. You simply reminded me of them, somehow.”

“You’re so hopeless, Nureyev,” Juno sighs, and Peter smiles his scheming smile.

“For you, my dear? Utterly,” he says, and then kisses him and kisses him until the thought of family is entirely wiped from his mind.


End file.
